Heat (13 page)

Kane gave the female beside him a final warning glance and then released her. “Stay close,” he said, “but stay behind me. Step where I step. If I tell you to run, you run. And know that I
will
find you.”

He saw no doubt in her eyes. Good. He was finally beginning to impress her.

Kane took his harvester but left the rest of his pack behind at the edge of the porch. He tested each of the warped steps before letting them take his weight. Despite all his efforts, the boards that brought him to the door groaned and muttered. Kane listened closely after each step, but continued to hear nothing within. He came to the door, tried the latch, and found it unlocked.

Humans. The further they lived from one another, the more vulnerable they made themselves, and the more reckless they became about guarding their lives. It was almost like they wanted to die, separating themselves from the herd in the hopes of attracting a passing predator.

Kane entered, primed for ambush. The inner room was muggy and stank of sweat and mold, so old and so ingrained in its environment that he doubted the humans who lived here even were aware of it anymore. He gestured for Raven to follow him, and heard her unskilled step on the porch as she obeyed. There was a stairwell in the corner of the room. Experience told Kane the bedrooms would be on the upper floor, but he checked the rest of this level first.

The kitchen beckoned. There were dishes still thick with scraps piled in the sink and the smell of meat and smoke was heavy in the air. Kane waved Raven over and put a hand on her shoulder, moving his lips right against her ear and giving his next command in a voice only a breath above silence.

“You need to drink,” he told her. “Slow. But as much as you can. And we both need to eat.” He put a claw right to her face and added, “If you try in any way to warn them we are here, I’m going to kill them anyway and the food you eat will be pulled from their own bodies.”

Raven paled even further, if that were possible, and she nodded.

Kane stepped back and watched while Raven opened cupboards and found a drinking glass. She went to the cold storage and filled her glass with something white, her face expressionless. She made very little noise.

Kane growled low approval when she started to drink and left her to it. She wasn’t as quiet as she thought she was; he would hear her if she ran and he was prepared to abandon the house to keep her. But he didn’t think she’d run.

Upstairs, he found his prey at last. Two humans—a male in one room and a younger female in another, the overpowering scent of their sweat betraying their genders from the hall. Both were sleeping. And if they’d turned off the light in the kitchen before they’d gone to bed, they might have been able to wake up in the morning. Life was funny.

Males tended to be stronger and more aggressive than females, so Kane moved on the male first. The human was snoring loudly enough to cover Kane’s approach, but he wakened just as Kane reached the side of the bed. He managed half a shout before Kane’s hand muzzled him, and he struggled ferociously as Kane swiftly flipped him onto his face. It ended with the dull snap of bone beneath the muffle of a pillow and Kane harvested the precious fluid the human’s brain provided in silence.

The female in the other room uttered a sleepy query and Kane went to meet her, ejecting the spent gland from his harvester as he went. She was already lying back down when he opened her door, but she was quick enough to fly up again at the intrusion. She tried to scream, but Kane leapt, smashing the legs out from under the bed when he landed and crushing the breath from her body. He covered the human’s mouth and shouted for Raven, just to know that she was still in the house.

She came, her footsteps echoing clumsily on the stairs, but stopped when she reached the bedroom door. She looked at him, at the struggling female he pinned. Her face crumpled. “You said I wouldn’t have to help.”

“Don’t help,” he said, and rolled the human onto her side. She was still struggling weakly, like the bird whose breast he had broken, and there was blood flecking her lips as she sucked in her gasping breaths. Time was limited; the gland could not produce its chemicals once the human died. “Just stay where you are.”

He worked quickly, struggling to find a good snapping-place on the back of the young humans underdeveloped skull. Finally, he was reduced to picking up a heavy-looking lamp at arm’s reach and crudely bashing her open. He located the necessary material, feeling the female’s body torpidly squirming as she died. He had nearly filled one ampule. It was a start.

A metallic rattle distracted him. Raven was at the human’s closet. She had pulled some clothing from the articles hanging there and was putting it on over the top of her ruined string-shirt. Her shoulders were shaking.

A good idea. The male in the other room was big, for a human. If Kane was going to be doing much travel by groundcar on the human’s roads, it would be smart to have a disguise.

“Stay close,” he said, and got up.

“Can’t I please go back downstairs?” Raven’s voice was broken, her eyes shining with desperation since her body was too dry for tears. She clutched both her hands before her, miming shackles, and said, “Please? Please.”

Kane glanced at the bed. Blood had soaked the pillow already, was dripping onto the floor. Without answering, he went to the wall and thumbed the switch that operated the light. He went to Raven, catching her wrist though she tried to cringe back, and dragged her to the bedside. He put her before him, his free hand closing on her jaw, aiming her at the body on the bed.

“Take a good look,” he said, unconsciously giving her the same words (and in much the same way) as Uraktus had given him, years and years ago. “That’s death. That’s what I deal in. Look at it. Smell it.”

Raven trembled in his grip. Her eyes were huge, staring. “She’s just a kid,” she whispered. She looked away, at the papers and human images that coated the walls, at the soft toys and pink-colored objects that cluttered the floor. She pushed back, blindly seeking the comfort of Kane’s chest; Kane, who had done the killing.

He patted her arm reassuringly and studied the dead human without much interest. He didn’t think she was as young as Raven believed. The female’s chest-bumps were full and firm, the scent of her musk was mature. She was young, but not that young. Death just had a way of shaving off the years.

Raven turned around and pressed her face into the crook of Kane’s arm. She made that sobby sound, but just once. “Are you going to kill me?” she asked.

“That’s up to you.”

“I want to live.” He could feel her breath on his bare skin. She said it again, as though trying to convince herself. Then she stepped away from him, her arms wrapped around her middle and her head bent. When Kane left, she followed.

In the male’s room, Kane found only a few items of value to him. Foot covers, heavy and grimed with use, but sized to fit even over Kane’s talons. A long coat, ill-fitting and much too heavy to wear all the time, but an essential thing, he thought, if he was to move for any length of time among humans. A head-cover, wide-brimmed, which Kane took solely to keep the sun out of his eyes as he walked. And finally, sitting right within easy reach of the bed, a weapon.

It was a hand-held pellet-projectile device, black and stinking of oil. Kane picked it up, feeling it heavy in his hand, and gave the dead male on the bed a long look. If he had reached for this instead of shouting, Kane would be dead on the floor right now. Life. Funny.

But he liked the thing. He like the dull gleam of it, the lethal feel of the metal. He glanced at Raven; she was gazing tight-lipped at the corpse. “What’s the name for this?” he asked, hefting the weapon.

“It’s a gun,” she answered dully. “I don’t know what kind.”

“Do you know how to work it?”

She dragged her eyes off the bed and finally came over, holding out one hand.

“Don’t touch it,” he said, pulling the thing back out of her reach and smiling faintly. A part of him was coming to approve of his human, and he thought he might eventually come to like her quite a lot, but he was light-years away from trusting her to hold a weapon. “Just tell me.”

“You need bullets first.” Raven looked around and came up with a box of shiny metal tubes. “These,” she said. “You put them in the clip part…right here…I’m going to have to touch the gun to show you.”

Kane could see where she was trying to get at. He pried at the place she called a clip, and managed on his second try to get it out. He eyed the bullets loaded inside, fit the clip back in place, pulled it out again, and then smiled. Just like a Kevrian pulsor, really.

“Now if you want to shoot somebody, you make sure the safety…this thing…is in the off position. It’s on right now, so it won’t fire.”

Kane toggled the ‘safety’ and aimed the weapon at the wall. It had been designed for a smaller hand and more fingers, but he found he could hold it sideways easily enough, and his thumb claw fit neatly into the trigger guard. He tested the pull, drawing back by minute degrees until the gun jerked in his hand with a flat thunderclap of sound. A black hole opened as by magic on the wall, coughing out a tiny spew of dust.

Simple. Elegant. Very effective.

Kane toggled the safety back on and put the gun into the pocket of his new coat, and then slung that over his arm, along with his other acquisitions. “Anything else?” he said.

Raven bent and picked up the dead human’s clothes from the floor. She put her hands in its inner folds and removed a bundle of flat metal shapes, strung together into a jingling ring like a baby’s toy, and then a leather pocket, shiny with time and bulky with material. From this, she took several folded bits of greenish-grey paper which she held out to him. Kane took them, puzzled. “Money?” he guessed.

Raven nodded. She was wiping down the sides of the leather pocket on her new shirt before letting it drop to the floor.

At first, Kane couldn’t imagine what had compelled her to rob the corpse for human currency. Then he remembered losing the first groundcar because it had expended all its fuel. He gave Raven a long, considering glance. She hadn’t forgotten. Even here, face to face with hard death and hating it, she’d kept her wits around her.

“There’s food downstairs,” she said now. Raven looked one final time at the body on the bed, and then turned away and preceded him out into the hall.

‘Boy,’ said Urak’s voice, in tones of mild appreciation. ‘You could have done a lot worse.’

Silently, Kane agreed. He followed his female downstairs.

E
ast.

The sun rose hot and hateful every morning, and Tagen walked into it. It blinded him, it burned his face and robbed his lungs of breath. It fell behind him every afternoon and Tagen could feel it like the hand of a murderous god, pushing him relentlessly ahead. He took his suppressants, but the heat was there regardless, leadening his limbs and clogging his mind of thought and purpose. His clothing stank. He stank. Sweat was a fog that warded off even the biting insects of Earth. He was in hell.

The forests gave way to mountains after four days of battle with branches and roots. The mountains were cooler, just enough to mock him, not enough to supplant his need for suppressants. And the mountains were more treacherous footing than even the forests had been. The ground beneath his feet was loose, dry, and unstable. He climbed, he fell, he rose bruised and often bleeding to climb again.

There were streams in the mountains, often springing right from the rock itself in eruptive white falls that were beautiful even to Tagen’s increasingly bitter turn of mind. The water was itself a torture, a curse disguised as a blessing. Tagen drank his limit at each he passed just for the sense of fullness it gave him, but the thirst was always with him. He could wash, or at least he could wipe away the newest layer of sweat and grime and briefly cool his burning flesh, but the stink of him never faded. Tagen was coming to hate even the sound of the water, splashing and burbling happily to itself in defiance of him. It stung at him more and more that he had to be grateful for it.

When he thought at all—the heat had a way of stealing in and smothering his brain—he thought of home. Not Earth. Earth was hell. Not even the living quarters the Fleet provided him when he was back on Jota. Home for Tagen was a ship. His own room—he was not a fourth-rank officer for nothing—near the stern, away from the relentless pulse and grinding of the nacelles. A ship, any ship, where it was dark and always cool, and he was surrounded by officers who thought and behaved just like him. Males with whom he could share some camaraderie. Females who would notice his rank and reputation, and make their overtures when the urge was on them to mate. A ship well-heeled with provisions, meat for the taking, iced
ul
by the bottle. A ship where there was no east.

After three days, the mountains fell again into forest, and Tagen descended its untrustworthy slopes (sometimes on foot, sometimes on his ass, and once, a good fifty meters on his damn face). The forest rose up and swallowed him again, this one thinner and even drier than before. The soil here was red, gritty and volcanic, and stained his talons the color of old blood. The trees were tall and branchless until they reached the sky; there, they grew arms bristling with needles, the same needles that carpeted the ground in slippery brown drifts. There were no more vines and thorns, but there were spiky bushes just shoulder-height, all to ready to slap and scratch at travelers.

The streams died out, but there was food, in the form of small hopping creatures in some abundance. They were tricky game. Unless he managed a head shot, the plasma bolt left nothing but a charred leg or two. Tagen considered himself a good shot to begin with, but three days of having his dinner depend on his aim made him a much better one in a very short span of time. The meat cooked up tough and tasteless, sustaining his physical needs while eroding his spirit.